Monthly Archives: September 2016

Milwaukee Bucks President Peter Feigin found himself in hot water this week for telling the truth at a Madison Rotary event about his team’s city as well as his experiences there. Somewhere between trying to jack up excitement for a team that went 33-49 last year and trying to explain how the state’s $250 million investment in an arena that looks like Elvis’ haircut, Feigin made a comment about race and the city:

“Very bluntly, Milwaukee is the most segregated, racist place I’ve ever experienced in my life. It just is a place that is antiquated. It is in desperate need of repair and has happened for a long, long time. One of our messages and one of our goals is to lead by example.”

“Milwaukee is a terrific community with wonderful people and I am proud to be a part of it,” Feigin said in a statement. “I was addressing a question about the social, economic and geographic divides that exist and how we can help address them. It wasn’t my intention to characterize the general community as overtly racist.”

Notice the “very bluntly” part came at a speech while the fine-tuned horseshit came in a statement? In other words, “I’m sorry I told the truth because I know I could get fired if the team isn’t drawing people and I made the mistake of being honest about my experiences here.” Also notice that Feigin is making a personal statement here: He says that it’s his experience that the city is segregated and that race is a big divider in the city. He wasn’t trying to use charts and diagrams to outline the math behind his experiences. He just noted how he felt about it. Y’know, kind of like how Newt Gingrich feels the country isn’t safer, even though crime is down? Or how some people just “feel” that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim infiltrator who will lead the next wave of a New World Order into Texas to take the guns away and pilfer the freedom of people in Amarillo? Yeah, just like that.

Except Feigin is actually more accurate in his perceptions than the Tin Foil Hat Militia down south.

I lived in and around Milwaukee during my formative years and have family dotted all throughout that area. I still visit on a monthly basis, if not more, and Feigin has a pretty good handle on what’s going on in that area.

These are just a few of touchstones for anyone who wants to look up and notice that, hey, we seem to be having a lot of problems when it comes to how the black folk and the white folk experience life, safety, justice and so forth in Cream City.

The comments after these articles are the exact kind you would expect to see here: the “presumably white” commenters are looking for “the smoking gun” of racism and the “presumably black” commenters are saying, “The whole fucking building is on fire and you’re asking us to point to the match that started it before we have a right to comment.” In both cases, people can see what they want: No, we don’t call the “bad part of town” something politically incorrect like “the ghetto” or “the inner city,” but that doesn’t absolve the city of sin. Not to generalize, but “The North Side” is just as clear of a code for Milwaukee whites as either of those things.

When I was younger, my friends and I would cruise around on Friday nights in our shitty cars. We knew that if you went toward Whitefish Bay (A.K.A. “White Folks Bay), we could gun our cars hard enough to set off the alarms on the street-parked BMWs and Lexuses. However, if we made a few wrong turns, the streets of brick homes suddenly became boarded up row house and corner markets with bars on their windows.

From Lincoln through Good Hope and from about 6th street up to about 68th, we knew we didn’t belong. It was the place one friend’s father told us that “Somebody oughtta build a fence around that area, throw in a shit ton of guns and let them go at it.” On the personal level, there were more than a few times we ended up in some place in that area to get gas and referred to it as being on the corner of “35th and Shitbag.” I’m not exactly proud of that, but I wasn’t alone in knowing where the lines were drawn in my hometown.

Telling people like Feigin to dial it back only continues to shove the issue under the table, only allowing it emerge when something becomes explosive. At that point, the “good white folk” can point to that flashpoint and either “tut tut” about it or stare on in amazement because “I had no idea things were so bad for those people.” Instead, let’s take that moment of blunt honestly and celebrate the fact that people who get here from elsewhere can see what we really are, even if we can’t. Then, let’s take advantage of this so that maybe we can have discussions on this when something can be done and not just after something was done.

The Insult Comedian’s meltdown over Alicia Machado continues. Hillary really punched the right button as Trump has been ranting about it ever since the Humbling at Hofstra. For those of you not on Twitter, here’s the latest:

Wow, Crooked Hillary was duped and used by my worst Miss U. Hillary floated her as an "angel" without checking her past, which is terrible!

Jeez, I thought Kellyanne and Breitbart Dude took Trump’s phone away. These tweets were posted in the middle of the night. I guess widdle Donnie couldn’t sleep. So much for his being a manly man, he’s really a whiny titty baby.

Time for another entry in the cats in boxes series. Oscar is jealous of all the Della pictures I’ve been posting so I decided to fulfill his desires with a picture of him in the Amazon fulfillment box. I wonder if I’ll get any free stuff out of this?

Holy clutter, Batman. It’s past time for us to take the donation boxes to Goodwill. Time for a musical interlude to get your mind off all the boxes:

“President Obama is the first President to be denied a hearing on his budget. He’s the first President to be denied a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee. President Obama is the first President asked to show his birth certificate,” Reid said on the floor. “President Obama is the first President to face over 500 filibusters here in the Senate. In this Republican Senate, President Obama will receive fewer nominees confirmed than any President in many many decades. Republicans have not done their basic work of government.”

<SNIP>

“They would have us believe that Trump just fell out of the sky and somehow mysteriously became the nominee of the party, but that’s not the way it is,” Reid said. “Everything that he’s said, stood for, done in this bizarre campaign that he’s run has come, filtered up, from what’s going on in the Republican Senate.”

Trump, Reid said, “is the monster Republicans built.”

“He is their Frankenstein monster. They own him,” he said.

I can’t say it better than that so I won’t try. I’ll let Eubie Blake play us out:

2016 has been a year of high-profile deaths: Bowie, Prince, Ali, Safer, Frey, Kantner to name a few. I ran an internal search after Shimon Perespassed and found I’d used the R.I.P. category 18 times thus far this year. I knew it was high but I didn’t realize there were that many, and there could have been more. 2016 needs its own acronym, TFY for This Fucking Year.

That brings me to Bury Me In Willow. It’s an achingly beautiful song about mortality written by Geoff Downes and John Wetton for Asia’s thirtieth anniversary album XXX. I hadn’t heard the album until a few weeks ago but it’s fucking good. The lyrics of Bury Me In Willow get me every time, especially these two stanzas:

When I’m gone, do this thing for me,
For this is my final day, and you know I would not joke,
So bury me in willow, not in oak.

Give me no standard, no eulogy,
No red, white and blue, no sceptre and no cloak,
Just bury me in willow, not in oak.

During a town hall-style interview on MSNBC on Wednesday night, Mr. Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president, was asked by the host Chris Matthews to name his favorite foreign leader.

Mr. Johnson, appearing flustered, was at a loss to come up with a name.

He grasped at a former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, who has been critical of Donald J. Trump, but was unable to remember his name without help — or the name of any sitting leader of a foreign country.

“I guess I’m having an Aleppo moment,” he said.

<SNIP>

Mr. Matthews, who was interviewing Mr. Johnson and former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts, his running mate, live at the University of New Hampshire, appeared to stall to give Mr. Johnson more time after the candidate repeated the initial question, looking slightly panicked.

“Any one of the continents, any country, name one foreign leader that you respect and look up to, anybody,” Mr. Matthews said.

Mr. Johnson exhaled loudly.

“Mine was Shimon Peres,” Mr. Weld interjected.

Mr. Matthews clarified that he was looking for someone who was still alive. He then named various countries and continents — Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia — in an apparent attempt to jog Mr. Johnson’s memory.

Mr. Johnson then made the “Aleppo moment” comment, indicating that he was having trouble coming up with Mr. Fox’s name.

Here’s the deal: Tweety wasn’t asking a gotcha question like, say, who is the President of Kazakhstan. (No, it’s not Borat.) It was a hanging curveball right over the plate and Governor Weed whiffed again. Among current office holders, I’d say Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. I know better than to say “the former President of Mexico” because several of them live in exile and are suspected of treating the public’s money like it was the Trump Foundation their own personal piggy bank. Weld threw out the name of the only former President who still lives in Mexico, Vicente Fox. Party on, Bill.

Gary Johnson is like a pothead Rick Perry. Of course, if Perry were a stoner he’d probably drink bong juice so Governor Weed is a tad smarter than him. I guess Tweety should have asked him weed related questions such as:

Remember all the talk about the candidate you’d like to have a beer with? Gary Johnson may be the candidate people would like to smoke a joint with but that’s a pathetic reason to vote for him. The mere idea harshes my buzz, man.

Gary Johnson seems like a nice guy. I’d never even consider calling him what I called Jill Stein: the Crunchy Granola Machiavelli. Sounds like something he’d munch on after a few bowls. Voting for him is a waste of time unless you’re an Ayn Rand groupie. He’s another in a long string of weirdos nominated by the Libertarian party including Ron Paul, Bob Barr, and everyone’s favorite man-of-the-people David Koch who was Ed Clark’s running mate in 1980.

Speaking of Vice Presidential nominees, I wonder if it’s too late to put Bill Weld on the top of the ticket? He’s actually qualified, and even knows there are other countries out there. Wow, man.

Rachel Maddow entitled her segment about Governor Weed’s latest howler, World Leaders Pretend, which, in turn gave me an earworm. I’ll let R.E.M. have the last word without Lawrence O’Donnell:

So, Monday night we all got a glimpse of the kind of train wreck a Trump administration would be — a yuge one — as The Donald sighed, sniffled, bullied, and lurched incoherently through his responses, equal parts Elmer Gantry and Elmer Fudd. “Laid an egg” doesn’t even begin to describe, and the equally scattershot/scatter-brained excuses — it was a bad microphone, Lester Holt was mean to me…the first half hour was good (that’ll be the one they really push, and at least some in the media are pathetically playing along) — anyway, the excuses just underscore that it was, ahem, a disaster.

More troubling though, is that despite the obvious — Trump is a fraud, a con artist, a grifter, and worse still, not a particularly good one, a fraud who’s managed to survive only because, to cite our side’s rhetoric, the game/system is rigged — despite this, some 40 plus percent of our fellow citizens (including a clear majority here in Loosiana) will vote for the guy come hell or high water. Their minds are made up…don’t confuse them with the fact that their nominee behaves like a particularly bratty eight year old.

There are very few people on today’s world scene that I would call a statesman or stateswoman. Shimon Peres was one of the few. He won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat in 1994. Mr. Peres died yesterday at the age of 93. It was a long life well lived.

I had hardly moved my things into my new office when Mr. Peres took me on my first ministerial trip to New York.

The moment we stepped off the plane, he transformed before my eyes from an antediluvian Israeli politician into a sprightly statesman. The image I had of him shattered; I saw a person who wanted to make the impossible possible.

That trip, he was on a mission to persuade American skeptics to bring life to the Dead Sea by building a canal from the Red Sea. He wanted to make the desert bloom and, in his region-conscious way, Israel’s neighbor Jordan, too. After a day full of conversations, speeches and events about this plan, I was exhausted — but he wasn’t done. For Mr. Peres, the night was young, and back out we went.

The affection he found abroad and his unflagging personal convictions gave him strength to face the powerful criticisms and hatred that were leveled at him at home. When fellow Israelis called him a traitor and screamed “Oslo criminal,” it hurt him. We could all see it in his eyes; he wanted to be loved — but he was not willing to give up on his beliefs.

I saw it every time I watched him ignore the cynics, risk being called naïve, and continue doggedly to speak for and pursue peace. This was the lesson that every leader needs to learn: Follow your inner compass no matter what.

I miss seeing Alex Wagner on MSNBC. She has one of those mega-watt smiles that is infectious. Alex has landed at the Atlantic and wrote a swell piece on the first debate and Presidential humor: Does Trump Know How To Laugh? She makes an important point about Trump:

Granted, a lot has been made of Hillary Clinton’s sense of humor—her laugh is shrill, too many of her jokes have seemed too prepared for far too long. But undoubtedly, at the first presidential debate on Monday, it was confirmed: Her sense of humor exists! And this mattered, because humor showed Clinton to be as self-aware as she was serious, and served to isolate Trump, making him seem like an angry spider caught in a tangled dystopia of his own construction.

This isn’t to say that Trump can’t get laughs. It’s simply that when he gets them, he’s humiliating people—whether “Low Energy” Jeb Bush, “Lyin” Ted Cruz or “Little” Marco Rubio. Humor borne out of cruelty happens to be the easiest and therefore lowest form of comedy: It is cheap stuff and it does not elevate the candidate, nor make him a more fundamentally sympathetic character. And when Trump does manage to grab laughs, his smile is a forced, flat line—a concession to facial spasm more than a natural expression of amusement or mirth.

Trump cannot joke about himself. He can only laugh at the expense of others. That’s why I call him the Insult Comedian: he has a funny delivery but cannot laugh at himself. There’s nothing quite as charming as someone who can make fun of themselves. Trump is capable of self-exaltation, not self-deprecation. It’s the sign of the jerk.

As to Alex’s point about Hillary. There’s nothing wrong with having joke writers as long as most of the gags land and one can laugh at one own’s clinkers, which was part of Johnny Carson’s genius. HRC’s demeanor at the debate was impressive: she resisted the urge to roll her eyes or pound the podium. Instead she took a different tack:

Clinton, perhaps more than at any time this campaign (excepting her recent appearance with Zach Galifianakis on Between Two Ferns) was relishing in a sort of comic levity, made initially evident in this exchange:

Clinton: I have a feeling that by, the end of this evening, I’m going to be blamed for everything that’s ever happened.

Trump: Why not?

Clinton: Why not? Yeah, why not?

Hey, why not? Therein began Clinton’s meta-routine, which was comprised not of laff lines, per se, but a series of joking asides that amounted to a rhetorical subtweet for the audience at home: Can you believe this guy?

Trump: And I think I did a great job and a great service not only for the country, but even for the president, in getting him to produce his birth certificate.

Holt: Secretary Clinton?

Clinton: Well, just listen to what you heard.

You could almost hear Clinton elbowing moderator Lester Holt in Dangerfield-esque disbelief, as if to say, Can you getta load of this one?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “Just listen to what you heard” is to the 2016 debates what “There you go again” was to 1980 and “Please proceed, Governor” was to 2012. If it was scripted, it was pure genius. If not, no wonder she did the Clinton Shimmy:

Was Shaq there too? I completely missed the greatest hoopster in LSU history. I know what some of y’all are thinking: It was Pistol Pete Maravich. You might be right but did he ever shimmy like that? Besides, this is neither the time nor place for *that* debate.

Now that I’ve made LSU hoops jokes, here’s the Clinton Shimmy side-by-side with the Insult Comedian:

Trump knows he lost the debate despite the 4chan and reddit shitbirds stuffing the online ballot box. That’s why he looked angry the entire debate and has been making lame schoolboy excuses ever since. Blame Lester. It was the microphone. She was over-prepared. The dog ate my homework. If he weren’t 70 years old, he might have even tried the old my grandpa/grandma died dodge. I grew up with a kid who must have had 16 grandparents die over the years and they all kicked the bucket right before a test.

This string of ludicrous excuses reinforces the notion that he’s unfit to be President. Everyone fails from time-to-time: the real WINNERS bounce back without whining and pointing the stubby finger of blame.

“The president of the United States, her husband, disgraced this country with what he did in the Oval Office, and she didn’t just stand by him, she attacked Monica Lewinsky,” Giuliani said in video posted to on social media by a website focused on coverage of millennials. “And after being married to Bill Clinton for 20 years, if you didn’t know the moment Monica Lewinsky said that Bill Clinton violated her that she was telling the truth, then you’re too stupid to be president.”

Remember what I said about glass housesthe other day? This from a man who had an affair while Mayor, then dumped his wife for his mistress. I guess that makes him smart even if he thought Trump deserved congratulations for not mentioning Bill’s indiscretions, which is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Repeat after me: if you live in a glass house, don’t throw stones.

I predicted a meltdown right after the Insult Comedian lost the debate to a girl:

I was only wrong about the forum. Trump’s Toddler Tantrum took place on Fox News, which is where all wingnuts go to lick their wounds and tell fat chick jokes. Just once I’d love to hear some self-mockery from the short fingered vulgarian, but I know it will never happen. That is yet another reason why Donald Trump will NOT be the first Insult Comedian elected President. Instead, he’ll be the losingest loser that ever lost.

I keep alluding to the late Peter Tosh’s song Glass House so I’ll give him the last word. Besides, a Rastafarian would scare the living shit out of your average Trumper.

Jimmy Rushing was a short, stout man with a big voice. His nickname was Mister Five-by-Five. He was the sort of guy Donald Trump would fat shame but Jimmy would have laughed it off. He’s best known for his time with Count Basie but worked with a string of Jazz luminaries: Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and Dave Brubeck to name a few.

I’d never heard 1955’s Listen to the Blues before, I was attracted to it by Eric Von Schmidt’scover art. The record is as every bit good as the cover.

A ten inch, six song version of the album was released as Showcase in 1957. It has a swell cover too:

I had to show you a picture of the man himself so here’s the cover of a 1963 album:

Listen to the Blues is only available via the YouTube playlist format. It’s well worth a spin.

Hilarious, but it requires some fake fact checking. A Benjamin sounds kind of low for a 2016 whipping. I learned all I know about current hooker prices from The Good Wife, but I think Chris Noth paid over $1K per session and that had noth-ing to do with kinky sex. Of course, Trump is famously cheap so he’d even stiff a dominatrix. That seems like a risky move to me, y’all. I bet he has Don the Spawn deal with shit like that…

Back to the post-debate reaction. I’ve been agitated by Trump’s bragging that he “won” the debate when his disemboweled entrails are still on the floor at Hofstra. Pity the poor janitor. In fact, I whipped out a tweet on that very subject:

The "polls" he "won" are all of the click on this box variety with no sampling. Surveys, not polls. https://t.co/Uh7CJP7iq7

Why would I expect the Insult Comedian to either know the difference or tell the truth about it? This is the man who blames his debate eve sniffles on a faulty mic, after all. That lie has about as much stamina as Trump himself.

It’s time to bring the whip down on this post:

Lest people think I forgot my Devo devotion, I’ll give them the last word:

What did swing or persuadable voters think? If you’re truly pro-Hillary or pro-Trump it doesn’t matter what you thought tonight. Your vote is baked in. But if you’re on the fence or thinking about not voting at all, your impression matters — a lot. And in this regard, I think Clinton was the winner. Unpersuaded college educated white women didn’t come away from this debate — at least not in large numbers — feeling reassured by Trump. Clinton was narrowcasting at the voters she needs. Trump was broadcasting to the voters he already has.

Twas ever thus, of course, but you can’t expect Jonah “Hurricane Katrina is a hilarious joke” Goldberg to understand a) politics and b) communication just because he is a professional, syndicated political columnist.

If Jonah’s depressed, his commenters are in the 93rd circle of hell:

“Relatively coherent” is a win? That’s a mighty steep curve.

–

“no truly painful soundbites”
Eeeeeeeeer ….. WHAT??????

“I have a better temparament than her”
“not paying taxes makes me smart”
“stiffing contracters, workers and the small business owners is good business”
“400 pound hacker”
Yada yada yada “Rosie O’Donnell” ….. ????????? With that one, Trump just swung all Jill Stein voters towards her. Good job!!
“stamina stamina stamina eeeeehh also stamina”… and then she zingered him.
He really sounded desparate, wondering why no one laughed at his joke, and then repeated it in the hope someone would laugh … Well, liberals laughed, havent stopped.

–

Amazing contortionist: Can step on his message with both feet in his mouth

These are HYSTERICAL Republican partisans. Commenting on the column of a man who wrote a book about how liberals are the real fascists.

This isn’t me saying it’s over and we can all chillax from now til November, but it is me saying AHAHAHAHAHAHA.

WOW-she just hit him hard talking about his businesses. Said she has an architect in audience that Trump didn’t pay him what he was suppose to be paid; how he has stiffed so many little people building his business, how he has gone bank rupt 6 times, etc.

I made an instant pudding joke in my pre-debate postas to whether my instant analysis would be sweet or savory. In the immortal words of the late Jackie Gleason, how sweet it is. Trump was even worse than expected and Hillary is the queen of the world right now as well as our next President.

I hope the MSM will compare the Insult Comedian’s demeanor unfavorably to the worst of Gore 2000. He glowered, scolded, grunted, and, worst of all, sniffled all night. One of the Trump cylons should have given him a Xyrtec to stop his nose from running. Of course, it perfects the analogy of him as an overgrown, snotty toddler. His horrendous performance shows what happens when you do not prepare for a debate and your opponent does. By the end of the evening, he was rambling incoherently about nukes and Rosie O’Donnell. It was Insult Comedian word salad. If I didn’t loathe and despise him, I’d *almost* feel sorry for him. Almost. How sweet it is.

As to Hillary, she exceeded my expectations, which were high to begin with. She looked great and was in command of the facts while her opponent spoke at a third grade level and wouldn’t know a fact if it bit him in the weave. Is it just me or did anyone else think his hair was slipping during the debate? It’s what happens when you cannot keep still for 90+ minutes.

Hillary also expertly punched Trump’s buttons; leading to angry shouting, chest thumping, and dick waving on his part. She laid out the bait and he fell for it every time. Needling him about his taxes and wealth caused Trump to lose his shit. I was a happy man. Hillary even came up with her own “Please proceed, Governor” or “There you go again” line. After one of Trump’s whoppers, she smiled, shook her head in sorrow, not anger, and said: “Just listen to what you heard.” It was the sound of Trump Fail. How sweet it is.

Lester Holt may not have had control over the debaters BUT he asked many of the right questions. The ones on Trump’s taxes and birtherism were on the money. He also refused to accept Trump’s Iraq War lie, which the Insult Comedian loudly and insistently repeated. Holt was so much better than Matt Lauer that the ghosts of NBC News past, David Brinkley and John Chancellor, will not have to haunt Lester. They can stay at Lauer’s pad. I hear the view is better….

It’s hard for me to evaluate the debate in great detail because I was riffing in the Crack Van and didn’t take any notes. I’m also biased: I’m a Hillary fan and a Donald hater. Having said that, she cleaned the lying son-of-a-bitch’s clock tonight. I expect a toddler tantrum on Twitter any time now, especially since an uppity woman called him on his bigotry, sexism, and ignorance. She really got under his skin and it was a pleasure to behold. How sweet it is.

I’m writing this before reading other reactions to tonight’s festivities but Mark Cuban was right to dub it the Humbling at Hofstra. I think Trump’s brief surge is over. He’s had a hard time getting over 44% in the national polls and this won’t help matters. Did he lose any of his hardcore supporters? Hell to the no, but I think Hill’s performance will move the needle with soft-Clinton supporters, third-party voters, and young ‘uns. It’s much better to have your sensible mom as President than the crazy uncle who watches too much Fox News. That’s how they came off and mom will always win that contest. How sweet it is.

I hope all the liberal Nervous Nellies will exhale and repeat after me: Hillary Clinton will be the first Oval One with ovaries and Donald Trump will NOT be the first Insult Comedian elected President. How sweet it is.

Nobody knows for sure which Trump will show up for the debate. Speaking of dopey, I expect to see Xanax Donald at the beginning but something may provoke a toddler tantrum. I hope so. The mere notion of Mark Cuban in the front row has already gotten under his skin. Cuban is a *real* billionaire and didn’t kill the sports league in which he owns a franchise.

The Gennifer Flowers stunt has been undermined by rampant confusion on the part of Team Trump. It’s a terrible idea and the “adults” on his team have attempted to undermine it but who knows? That’s another reason why he should never be the first Insult Comedian elected President. He’s erratic and unstable as well as an habitual liar. If you want to blow shit up, he’s your guy. I have no idea why anyone thinks that a good idea but they do. I do not.

One more point on the Jennifer with a G (as Molly Ivins was fond of calling her) stunt. I’m with Peter Tosh on this one: “when you live in a glass house, don’t throw stones.” It’s one reason Bill’s roving eye didn’t come up in the 1992 general election. Poppy Bush lived in his own glass house and had the good sense not to rock that issue. Leroy N Gingrich and Bob Livingston would have been wise to follow Poppy’s example during the impeachment clusterfuck. Of course, the Insult Comedian is a short-fingered vulgarian not known for impulse control so anything could happen.

In an attempt to dramatize an inherently dramatic event, the MSM has hyped the debate as a game changer. That’s unlikely. Debates rarely, if ever, decide elections. They do, however, confirm biases and trends. The 1980 Reagan-Carter tangle gave people a green light to roll the dice and vote out an unpopular incumbent but it did not decide the election. Carter was doomed by the hostage crisis and a terrible economy.

There’s a fascinating oral history of the 2000 Bush-Gore debatesin the New York Times. It posits that they decided that election. They did not. It was a squeaker all the way and other factors decided that race. Team Gore’s refusal to judiciously deploy Bill Clinton was the fatal mistake: nobody blamed the Veep for the Big Dog’s personal fuck ups. Clinton would have helped with some constituencies and might have even helped Gore win his home state of Tennessee. It’s never a good idea to nominate a candidate who cannot win their home state, which is something that’s going to happen in 2016 when New York kicks Trump to the curb. In the end, the debates did not defeat Gore, MSM sneering, Ralph Nader, and the Supreme Court gave the prize to the nitwit from Texas.

As to other famous debate moments, I don’t think Nixon’s makeup gave the election to Kennedy or that Ford’s “liberation of Poland” elected Carter. Nixon was running for a third Eisenhower term without the genial General at the top of the ticket and Ford pardoned Tricky for his Watergate crimes. 1976 was going to be a Democratic year in the same way that 1968 and 1980 were for the GOP. The same dynamic applied in 2008. This year is wide open BUT the third consecutive term thing is one reason the race is closer than it should be. I’ll start worrying about national polls *only* if Trump hits 46-47% in one of the quality polls. Thus far, 44-45% has been his ceiling.

Years later, Carter told Jim Lehrer, “I watched that tape afterwards and it was embarrassing to me that both President Ford and I stood there almost like robots. We didn’t move around, we didn’t walk over and shake hands with each other. We just stood there.” Ford added, “I suspect both of us would have liked to sit down and relax while the technicians were fixing the system, but I think both of us were hesitant to make any gesture that might look like we weren’t physically or mentally able to handle a problem like this.”

Ultimately, sound was restored although many have subsequently claimed that those 27 minutes were the finest in the history of presidential debates. Journalist Sander Vanocur later described the incident as “an unnatural act between two consenting candidates.”

Pardon the digression but that was a helluva quote. It follows that we’ll get back to Fallows now. He has the best description of Trump’s alpha-male shtick that I’ve seen:

“In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals,” Jane Goodall, the anthropologist, told me shortly before Trump won the GOP nomination. “In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position.”

In her book My Life With the Chimpanzees, Goodall told the story of “Mike,” a chimp who maintained his dominance by kicking a series of kerosene cans ahead of him as he moved down a road, creating confusion and noise that made his rivals flee and cower. She told me she would be thinking of Mike as she watched the upcoming debates.

That story reminds me of a male chimp at the San Francisco Zoo when I was a kid. His dominance stunt was masturbating into a burlap sack and throwing it at all and sundry. On one memorable day, he threw it at the crowd and, to my mother’s horror, 5-year-old-me caught it. I wish I could say that I put on a vigorous and imaginative display but I don’t remember what happened after my encounter with the master debater. Like Tommy T, I went there. Literal malakatude reigns supreme…

I suspect HRC will do fine tonight since Trump knows *nothing* about public policy and is easily distracted by bright shiny objects like Mark Cuban’s Shark Tank ratings. The second best description of Trump’s debate style in the Fallows article is from short-lived Democratic Presidential candidate Martin O’Malley:

I asked former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who was onstage with Clinton and Sanders for the first five encounters, whether he’d seen Clinton make any significant mistakes. “No,” he said. “Dammit!” To round things out, when I asked O’Malley how he would be preparing to debate Trump if he’d won the nomination, he said, “I’d start by thinking of him as a monkey with a machine gun.” By that he meant an adversary who is all the more dangerous because you can’t predict which direction he’ll be facing when he pulls the trigger.

A monkey with a machine gun? I like that. It fits the rat-a-tat-tat speaking style of the Insult Comedian in full flight. Hopefully, he’ll point the machine gun at himself. He’s done it before.

The danger for the Democrats in this debate is how low the bar is set for Trump. If he doesn’t whip his dick out and brag about how big it is, the MSM may declare him the “winner” on style as opposed to HRC taking it on substance. It’s what happened with the Matt Lauer debacle, after all. If things do not go well tonight, just remember that John Kerry cleaned W’s clock in all three 2004 debates and still lost the election. Debates are important, not decisive.

Mark Cuban has called this debate the Humbling at Hofstra. That’s one reason the Crack Van will emerge from the Bat Cave, or wherever A keeps it, for tonight’s tussle. She’ll have the details later and I’ll be back in the wee hours with an instant analysis, pudding, or some weird combination of the two. I have no idea if it will be savory or sweet.

Running from Trump right now means running from that power. They’ve never done that in all their livin’ lives no matter what supposed assault was being mounted on their beloved conservative principles. They learned to love racism and they learned to love the military industrial complex and they learned to love the surveillance state and they learned to love vast governmental expansions and they learned to love borrowing and borrowing and borrowing again. They learned to love everything they say they hate, so why not Trump, too?

The only people who honestly thought the GOP would stand on principle were people who had a buck invested in convincing Americans the GOP would stand on principle. Everybody else knew the score from day one.